Tag Archives: confirmation bias

Maybe you went through it too.In your teenage years the fascination began.Before you knew it, you had a stack of them tucked away, each well-thumbed and ogled over.Guinness Books of World Records, I mean, of course.We’re captivated by extremes.While working on a fictional story the other day, I started wondering about longevity claims.The Good Book suggests that once upon a time a century was the equivalent of becoming a teenager, and people were acting like teenagers well into their eighth or ninth centuries.Modern scientific analysis provides an alternative narrative, putting upper limits at 120, with only one verified, and disputed, case putting someone over it.Curious, I looked at Wikipedia.Two pages (at least) address the issue, one on human longevity tout court and another on verified claims.Since the lists include home nations, I began to notice a pattern.

The verified records tend to feature the United States, Japan, Canada, and Europe.The unverified Russia, Latin America, and Western Asia.This disparity struck me as perhaps a bias concerning the source of reliable information.Not only affecting longevity reports, concerns about reliable data impact all our sources of information.I’ve written about internet resources before, but here I’m mainly worried about the bias of “first world” records as opposed to the records of less developed countries.Not only that, but in the case of longevity claims, those born in outlying areas—beyond the reach of official government recorders—are suspect when compared to those kept by city dwellers.We tend to trust our own kind, especially when it comes to extreme claims.

Like John Mellencamp, I was born in a small town.Official records, comfortably handwritten, indicate when and where that happened, to the nearest day.(Birth is a process, of course, and doesn’t always obey conventional human time-marking practices.Organic events are often that way.)The fact of the existence of other people indicates that they too have been through this in some form.The event was marked in the way of local custom.It’s locally true.I knew a doctor trained in Sweden.She couldn’t practice medicine in the United States for fear of what boils down to competing forms of belief.Xenophobia in medical practice extends to other areas of human knowledge as well.We are taught to trust the information given by our own authorities, but not those of other cultures.I’m suppose to accept that without question, but I wasn’t born yesterday.

Public versus private has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Partially it’s because I’ve been reading about magical beliefs and their persistence. It always amazes me how publicly we declare ourselves rational and uninfluenced by the supernatural. Once we get behind the closed doors of our domiciles, however, a transformation takes place. Our insecurities and uncertainties surface. Given the right circumstances we might even confess that we believe in magic. I know I’m generalizing here, but private space does allow for private thoughts and getting out with others can bring a much-needed relief. I was reading about Hex Hollow in an article a friend sent me from Roadtrippers. Hex Hollow is a small town in my native Pennsylvania where a murder took place over witchcraft. I won’t go into the details here—the Roadtripper story is quite brief and tells the tale—but it turns out a man was killed for being a witch. His murderer was also a witch who’d been sent to him by yet a third witch. The crime took place in 1928.

Think about the timeframe for a second. It was between the World Wars. Technology was fairly advanced. Witch trials had ended centuries ago. Still, some people believed enough in witches to kill for their conviction. Historians of religion have pointed out that Americans have never really outgrown the belief in magic that we deny so assiduously. I’m not trying to single out one nation here—there is widespread evidence that magical thinking is endemic to the human thought process. We aren’t so quick to let something go that, according to reason, has served us well. Had magical thinking been purely detrimental it should’ve died out long ago. We need our magic.

As yesterday, so today.

I’m not suggesting witchcraft is real. At the same time I know that it’s natural enough for thoughts to move into familiar terrain when stressed out. In Hex Hollow the man who did the murdering was convinced he’d been hexed by his victim. Perhaps he’d climbed the ladder of inference (what we tend to call confirmation bias) to a rung where the only way down was a criminal act of desperation. That’s no excuse to kill someone, of course, but it fits with what we know of an all-too-human form of stress relief. Nor is it rustic rubes to blame. Psychics in New York City are abundant and even US presidents have been known to consult the stars a time or two. Of course, once I step outside that door I’ll say it’s all nonsense.